#so it really doesn't just feel like playing as a rdm it FEELS like you're playing AS alisaie

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

on a completely different subject. one thing i really like about the "role-playing" system for ffxiv's story quests (where you're given control of an npc for a gameplay section) is that they frequently have to strip the mechanics of the npc's class/job waaaay down, because they don't want to throw you straight into the deep end of some complex gameplay loop you've never used before, BUT, they also take that opportunity to both rearrange and reskin some of the class abilities that get retained. leading to the implication that the WoL's version of the class isn't actually the only or even the standard version of the class, and that even people who have the same job learn and implement the fighting techniques in slightly different ways. which i think is really fun and makes a lot of sense and is way more fitting than every single samurai or w/e playing the exact same.

[curioussubjects]

in which i revisit black market and it's worse somehow

for reasons even i find elusive, i read the transcript for rdm's podcast episode on "black market" (i know i know), but i really do appreciate the spirit behind this particular pod episode. i just. it's just. y'all....you cannot make this stuff up:

"there is no socioeconomic structure beyond the Rag Tag Fleet. There's no government. There's no social system. There's no nothing. Other than these particular ships. Isn't everything black market? Isn't everything to be bartered?" there's so much going on here. like. what do you mean there's no government or social system. the fleet literally has an executive and legislative branch. the executive literally has an enforcement arm through the military. ron please. 😭😭 the idea there's no social system is also bizarre when there's no indication the colonial social system wasn't reproduced down to caprican hegemony. also love the implication that the presence of a barter system nearly if not completely equates to the existence of a black market. that's. that-. hm. what i do think is interesting here though is that a black market existing isn't actually, imo, a foregone conclusion. that it exists at all suggests: 1. there seems to be no enforcement of the rule of law, 2. no regulation of trade, and 3. the government isn't adequately meeting the needs of the fleet with supply distribution.

sometimes i remember rdm has a polisci degree and i want to jump into a river.

but anyway, some of this stuff is discussed in the writer's room and all i can think about is how in the world did anybody think a topic this huge could fit into one standard episode of television. a lot of the bulk could be done in one episode, but you'd be returning to this as subplots and background commentary in future episodes.

"I was really disappointed in the show and myself and what we had done and didn't feel like the episode really had anything going for it." yeah man no fucking shit. you can't build a story out of vibes alone 😭

"You never quite get at the satisfaction of truly having gone through a plot that you had no idea where it was gonna go and you're shocked where it ended up. And you're not really sitting back and going, "My God. Lee Adama is nothing like I thought he was." It just doesn't- it falls in between. It's classically standing on the two chairs and falling in between both of them." the problem you're having is that you never connect what's going on with the black market plot with what's going on with lee. there's no line there beyond right place right time. clearly there's an ethical issue here in that lee is complicit with the black market. THAT'S what's interesting. our ethical center character, who values justice and the law is complicit in something that is happening outside of legal purview and also harms and exploits people. and then culminates with lee doing some light extrajudicial killing. but we never sit with any of it. much less see it play out in future episodes.

which is why this following bit kills me : "Tigh and Ellen and Ellen's involvement in the black market and she's getting things for Tigh, who is a senior officer in Galactica. There's a whiff of corruption here and what does it mean? We're not gonna- we don't take the easy way out. Tigh isn't shocked at what his wife is doing and promises never to do it again. He understands what she's doing. There is an implication that, "Who knows what else Ellen Tigh is doing with Commander Fisk?" I'm not sure that's a picture I want in my mind, but, ok. And Lee is also a bit dirty in this scene. Lee is also engaged in things that are probably not that above-board. There's an implication that Lee helped get the medicine for the little girl and probably went outside official channels. And it's a personal, emotional, confrontation with people with conflicted and conflicting motivations." THAT'S THE EPISODE! RIGHT THERE! YOU HAD IT!

the episode is about ethics, a government failing its people, and complacency. you want an episode of television without having to make a mini arc out of it? those are your themes.

then there's the clusterfuck that is the gianne/shevon/dee portion of the episode, which makes no gd sense AND HERE'S WHY LMAO: "It's not really getting to a place where we're explaining, or at least hinting, or making you think about what is the nature of the relationship between Dualla and Lee. Why is Lee interested in her and vice versa? What does it mean to him as a character? We had conversations in the writers' room that dealt with things like, "Well, Lee's got the girl he left behind on Caprica, he's seeing the prostitute, and then there's Dualla." So there's the classic- there's three women in Lee's life. One dead, two not. What does Dualla represent in that? What is- what is Dualla to Lee in juxtaposition to the dead woman and to the hooker with the little girl? Is she the hope? Is she the future? Is she something more realistic? Is the hooker the hope? There's a lot of ways you can just sit and talk about it endlessly about what it all represents, and it was all fascinating conversation. Unfortunately it just doesn't quite sync-in to what we have. You don't ever- you never quite get to a place where you're rooting for Lee and Dualla. I think that's might be the central problem with it. You're never quite rooting for her."

truly mysterious why this doesn't work rdm. boggles the mind.

he offers no explanation as to why it doesn't work, btw, it's all just "???"

we're not rooting for dee because lee doesn't actually want her. just like he didn't actually want gianne.

meanwhile shevon is the epitome of lee playing it safe. he's obviously lonely and in need of talking to someone, and having emotional and physical intimacy. he wants it without the possibility of being too vulnerable or hurting someone else when he runs. through shevon we understand some of the reasons why lee left gianne. through his relationship with shevon and gianne, we can begin to see what might underlie lee's budding relationship with dee.

and then perhaps we remember lee's behavior during the miniseries. and then maybe we watch scar next and a couple more things become clear.

we're not rooting for dee because we're rooting for someone else entirely. (kara. it's kara.)

i am in the tantrum hole.

"we're playing that Zarek needs to tell Lee about Phelan and about this ship out there where you can get anything you want that's the hub or the nexus of the black market. And yet everybody else seems to know about it. It's clearly the place where all this activity is going, but somehow Lee needs to be told by Zarek that it even exists, which tends to undercut Lee's role as an investigator and the procedural aspect starts to feel a bit weak because you feel like he should've- Lee should've known all that on his own and again, it's an element that doesn't work"

OR it could be something about complacency, a failure in governance, and how out much the Galactica is actually a bubble. very interesting concept for lee who feels disconnected after RS2.

it's not that lee's obliviousness doesn't work, it's that he has the privilege of not needing to think about it. he could even already be seeing shevon and thinking it's all above board like it was back in the colonies, not realizing there's a criminal enterprise going on that is exploiting desperate people.

what happens when lee does learn about how bad it is out there in the fleet?

that's your episode set up.

"When Lee shoots him, you should feel that he shoots him because, "Oh my God! I'm realizing that he is like Bill Duke and oh! Woah! I'm like shocked. And that's- I don't know how I feel about Lee, but I'm really surprised because he's more like Bill Duke than I thought." I don't think the show really says that. I don't think we've accomplished that mission. And that should have been the mission here, is if you're going to predicate a whole show on this concept, about this central confrontation it should pay off that idea." that should not have been the mission there omfg. lee shoots this man because he's doing fucked up shit. the shocking moment isn't that lee is like the bad guy, the shocking thing is that mr. articles of colonization did an extrajudicial killing. he executed a man without due process.

the question here is: is lee more like his father and laura roslin than he'd like to admit? if so, what is he going to do about it?

and btw, is lee like his father completely ties back to a possible reason why he runs from gianne: he saw himself marrying a woman he got pregnant, thus repeating the story of his parents. and it doesn't need to be 1:1 exactly, but there are too many similarities for his comfort. so he runs.

and another theme: lee doing what he knows is the right thing to do vs. lee doing what he thinks is the Right thing to do. and to what extent does lee hide behind duty because he's scared of going after what he wants. (and oh look at that we're back to kara)

this scene is interesting because lee does something he felt in the moment to be right (and he does it on impulse, which is another bit of tension with his character in other episodes), but he also acted against his ethical code. what are the effects of that? how does lee grapple with that? WE JUST DON'T KNOW

i am still in the tantrum hole.

"I think if I had to sum up what's wrong with this episode in my opinion, it's that this time we went for a much more tv, conventional tale and execution." narrator: that's not what was wrong with the episode. "So again it's a grab bag of things we're trying to do." narrator: that's more like it.

incredible podcast though it's like 10/10 reflection 0/10 insight. showrunner of all time this guy.

[leftoblique]

Job changes I want for FFXIV 7.0

Watching Mr. Happy's video and I also have Thoughts and Feelings. I'm only going to talk about the jobs I play a lot though.

Dragoon

The core DRG rotation is great; I love the length and the positionals, and how there are a few different windows where you can force a crit.

Adding the secondary resource in EW was fine, but there should be more things you can do with it. Here's what I say:

Remove Mirage Dive and make High Jump add to the dragon gauge. There's no reason this should be two actions.

Add a second, higher-potency, single-target attack that consumes the focus gauge.

They are going to do a full rework here, so I hope if they do that they stick really closely to the class fantasy first and foremost. DRG is such a unique Final Fantasy job that having it be a grab bag of mechanics only takes away from what it could be.

Machinist

This class fucks; no notes. Well, okay, one note:

Flamethrower needs a damage and range boost and/or have it replace Auto-Crossbow.

The reason for this is that mechanically, it's usually better to use Auto-Crossbow, but Flamethrower is more fun. Having to choose is frustrating.

Dancer

This job is honestly just too busy. I like it a lot. But all of the extra procs have to go. What order should I use them in during the Devilment window? I don't know! Does anyone know?

This is one of those cases where you can very easily do addition-by-subtraction.

Scholar

Another job that fucks. I love the number of options it has. However, if I may suggest:

Provide way stronger healing/more perks during the Seraph phase. Make it a real healing overdrive mode.

Scholar more than any other healer is about resource management, so for example having the Seraph versions of Selene/Eos actions being more powerful means you have to decide if you're going to concentrate your healing in that window (which you also have to time the deployment of) or spread it out over the fight. It's one of those opportunities for high-end fiddly optimization that also makes you feel like a genius when you use it to save a regular duty.

Riffing on that, another thing you could do would be to make Seraph provide the benefit of Fey Illumination, so you could get rid of that action. Just a flat healing boost when she's deployed.

White Mage

I love that they made GCD lily healing not a damage loss in EW. I will now actively burn lilies so I can get a blood lily under party buffs and it makes me so happy.

Here's a small change I might make:

Increase the potency of Cure III, possibly with an increase in mana cost. I love that you can deploy a bonkers strong emergency heal, with Thin Air if need be.

Because WHM doesn't have a lot of resource management, MP should be the other resource you need to watch. They already get two stacks of Thin Air, so in the event you need an emergency heal or raise you still have it. But it definitely keeps it in line with BLM as "traditional mage jobs where MP is a thing you care about".

Gunbreaker

TRIPLE DOWN.

That is all.

Paladin

It's clear they don't know what they want to do with Goring Blade; it's changed function and place in the rotation a couple of times already. Either get rid of it or move it back to being a high-potency DoT you have to alternate with your other 3; that was more interesting.

I also agree with Mr. Happy that either Cover or Intervention need to be removed, or they need to be combined into something more interesting. I love the idea that as a PLD you protect other people by taking damage for them; it's just really hard to make that feel right in the middle of combat.

Red Mage

RDM is... fine? Like, it's pretty easy to play, and the hardest thing is just using all of your procs and CDs at the right time.

However, a thing I've always wanted is to make the pew-pew less punishing. Let's get some love for Reprise in here, okay? Update: lol they just did this in EW.

[tekutiger]

I'm back to leveling another class to 90, and this time it's Reaper ❤️‍🔥. I'm sitting at level 80 right now.

The last time I did the class quests for this storyline was right after Endwalker launch, on Tobi. I honestly couldn't remember much of it, if anything! I just kept thinking... "I don't remember this...." "Is this really what happened?" "Was it really this traumatic the first time around?". Like, how could I forget all of that? I guess it was around a year and a half ago, but good gods. Mostly what I remember is the Arena area (in the screenie above).

Class Quest at Level 75 has something of a jump scare, imo, and I just... really wish that I did NOT forget about that. I was taken aback trying to cover my monitor screen going "Ew! Ew!". Thanks SE for that one 🫣🫠

I know when I first played through it, Reaper and Sage had a LOT of popularity due to being the new classes with the new expansion. It's possible I semi-rushed through the questline and didn't give it the attention it deserved.

BUT what I guess I'm actually trying to say in a very long ramble-y process; the story for the reaper class quests is really good. I feel like it's something that resonates with me, much in the way that the DRK story quest line does.

There are a lot of classes I feel like I mesh well with, and some I 'click best' with too (which is saying something for an alt-o-holic), but we're talking class quests here, not the classes themselves. Even for my main class, I don't feel like they did the class quests proper justice. Like... Red Mage and Vampires? (They're not actual vampires to any non-FFXIV players reading this, but pretty darn close, lol)

And no offense to my fellow RDM mains who actually like that story line, but, it's sinking near the bottom for me in terms of 'connecting with me' 🤷🏻‍♀️ (this has turned rantyyyy oops lol 🙃). I think some other's feel that way about their fave classes though. Like, I've heard split reviews with PLD and WAR... I personally love SCH's storyline, but I've heard people say they dislike it. So on and so forth... 🤷🏻‍♀️. To each their own, at the end of the day.

I'm gonna put spoiler-y things under the cut now 😊

If you've even reached Stormblood, you might notice something about this guy here ☝🏻. Even more so if you've progressed through Shadowbringers, and MORE so through Endwalker. Most definitely through Endwalker. 100% sure I didn't notice it my first playthrough cause I hadn't finished Endwalker yet...

In so many ways he reminds me of Zenos, and yet he also doesn't. There's even a small portion of this 70-80 questline that dips into Solus zos Galvus. It shares some backstory that includes him but the information is significant to Drusilla's story only, and for the sake of moving the Reaper class questline forward. If you're seeking knowledge about Emet, for the sake of learning more about Emet, it's not going to be much.

Speaking of Emet, I've also been eyeing those skills 'Shadow of Death', 'Whorl of Death' and 'Arcane Crest', they look awfully familiar 🤔. Kind of look like some of his Hades abilities, and his glamour weapons, no?

I could ramble on more about that but I'm sure that's been toppled, explained, confirmed, and I've missed it. Or there's better theories and HCs than what's brainrotting in my head 🫠

I know the first time I played through this class, I told myself NOT to like it, because of how popular it was. The same thing with SGE. I felt getting the opportunity to ever play it was either A) never going to happen, or B) going to take a very very long time to happen- as in, an entirely new expansion would have to drop with new classes.

It's over a year & a half later and I think things have finally simmered down with those two classes. Maybe. I can finally say "Yes! I like this class! \o/". I know that's silly, but so is loading into an alliance raid with like, ALL Reapers and ALL Sages. Does anyone else remember that?!

Okay, I guess it wasn't that bad. I'll be honest, I was the first to laugh very loud whenever I got those groups. Mainly cause I'd be the sole RDM and legit felt like a black sheep 😅

Now I get to level 80-90, and go bug Emet again in Ktisis Hyperboreia when I reach level 87, haha 😄. This poor man can't get rid of me 🥰